I saw this abstract in the Journal of Medicinal Food on Brent Pottenger's Twitter Feed earlier today.
Stephanie Jew; Suhad S. AbuMweis; and Peter J.H. Jones
Abstract
The evolution of the human diet over the past 10,000 years from a Paleolithic diet to our current modern pattern of intake has resulted in profound changes in feeding behavior. Shifts have occurred from diets high in fruits, vegetables, lean meats, and seafood to processed foods high in sodium and hydrogenated fats and low in fiber. These dietary changes have adversely affected dietary parameters known to be related to health, resulting in an increase in obesity and chronic disease, including cardiovascular disease (CVD), diabetes, and cancer. Some intervention trials using Paleolithic dietary patterns have shown promising results with favorable changes in CVD and diabetes risk factors. However, such benefits may be offset by disadvantages of the Paleolithic diet, which is low in vitamin D and calcium and high in fish potentially containing environmental toxins. More advantageous would be promotion of foods and food ingredients from our ancestral era that have been shown to possess health benefits in the form of functional foods. Many studies have investigated the health benefits of various functional food ingredients, including ω-3 fatty acids, polyphenols, fiber, and plant sterols. These bioactive compounds may help to prevent and reduce incidence of chronic diseases, which in turn could lead to health cost savings ranging from $2 to $3 billion per year as estimated by case studies using ω-3 and plant sterols as examples. Thus, public health benefits should result from promotion of the positive components of Paleolithic diets as functional foods. [emphasis added]
Alright, it's god to see this sort of thing, and then of course there was the article in the Washington Post just a couple of days ago: Paleolithic diet is so easy, cavemen actually did it. There's some saying somewhere that I can't recall right now to look up, but it's on the process of establishing truth and that at first it's vehemently denied by everybody and in the end nobody even remembers the truth as not always having been the established truth or ever having been ridiculed by the sheeple. Well, if the pages and pages and pages of comments from absolute morons and idiots are any indication, then we're right on track. As Mike Eades wrote when he retweeted my tweet yesterday: "Idiots by the dozens, morons by the score."
So, on the one hand, you've got no end of dumbasses in the WaPo comments who are merely exposing their ignorance -- god or bad, I suppose, depending on your view (I think it's good and I think it's good that it's being ridiculed just now). Yet on the other, supposed experts are still describing the Paleo diet in terms very few actual practitioners use (see emphasized bits, above). The nonsense "lean meats" just won't die, I guess, even though even Cordain has finally recognized that saturated fat does not associate with adverse health. "Low in vitamin D?" Are they serious? This is a "disadvantage?" Who doesn't know that ALL diets are low in vitamin D? Just like everyone else, you need to get some sun and just to be safe, supplement. And if you're getting sufficient vitamin d and k2 via sunlight, supplementation and foods high in k2 like eggs, butter, liver and so on, calcium is not an issue.
So, I don't know what I'd rather deal with or what's actually a good sign and what's not. I have this feeling that the morons and ignoramuses in the WaPo are beneficial and that mischaracterizations from experts as to what the diet is and spurious "disadvantages" are harmful.
What do you think?
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Please spread the word
Hi Richard,
I am currently reading Muscle, Smoke, & Mirrors by Randy Roach (http://www.randyroach.ca), and I think the following adds nice texture to your excellent post:
In 1928, Vilhjalmur Stefannson tested an all-meat diet on himself under medical surveillance in Bellevue Hospital. Here is his firsthand account as he reflects on both his current n=1 self-experiment and on his previous experiences living amongst the Eskimos (pgs. 59-60 of MSM Volume I):
“As said, in the arctic we had become ill during the second or third fatless week. I now became ill on the second fatless day [(during the experiment at Bellevue)]. The time difference between Bellevue and the arctic was due no doubt mainly to the existence of a little fat, here and there in our norther caribou – we had eaten the tissue from behind the eyes, we had broken the bones for marrow, and in doing everything we could to get fat we had evidently secured more than we realized. At Bellevue the meat, carefully scrutinized, had been as lean as such muscle tissue can be. Then, in the arctic we had eaten tendons and other indigestible matter, we had chewed the soft ends of bones, getting a deal of bulk that way when we were trying to secure fat. What we ate at Bellevue contained no bulk material, so that my stomach could be compelled to hold a much larger amount of lean The symptoms brought on at Bellevue by an incomplete meat diet (lean without fat) were exactly the same as in the arctic, except that they came on faster – diarrhea and a feeling of general baffling discomfort. Up north the Eskimos and I had been cured immediately when we got some fat. Dr. DuBois now cured me the same way, by giving me fat sirloin steaks, brains fried in bacon fat, and things of that sort. In two to three days I was all right but I had lost considerable weight.”
Personally, from my n=1 experience, I can hardly stomach lean meat: I prefer, by simply following what my body tells me, hyperlipidity. Everything that I can deduce seems to correlate well with Stefansson’s account.
Cheers to the New Year!
Best,
Brent
Me too. I like a nice grilled piece of lean chicken breast — so long as I melt a half stick of butter as a dipping sauce!
No one would know better than you, the King of Sauces!
It’s possible that no publicity is bad publicity. Desperate people try any number of diets, including fad diets and those based on the dogma of low fat. Surely, once these individuals know Paleo exists, they will give it a shot eventually and change their lives for the better.
You really have to be an optimist to perceive the painfully slow changes in conventional wisdom, but it is happening. Slowly, but surely, people’s eyes are opening, and the nay-sayers are simply dying out, which, as Richard always points out, is the only way conflict is settled.
I’m with Brent on hyperlipidity. My tastebuds, appetite, and stomach have been so totally reprogrammed that now I look at fat and quite literally see healthfulness. Once you disabuse yourself of the low-fat brainwashing, you can almost feel your body go “ahhhh” as that delicious bit of marbling or butter dissolves in your mouth.
-Bryce Lee
Keep ‘listening to your body’, Bryce, and leading by example.
I’m so sick of the stupid arguments and whining of the people around me who are either sick or can’t lose weight. When I tell them to cut out grains and sugar, they whine “I can’t, it’s too hard!” or “It’s too expensive!” or “But **INSERT NAME HERE** low-fat-high carb diet is soo much easier!”
These same people sent me the link to the NYT article about ammonia in beef, and how they will just stop eating meat now. When I mention grassfed beef, they whine “I can’t afford it!” But they can afford to have their gall bladder removed, cancer, etc. all those carby snacks, going out to dinner, buying bigger clothes every 6 months…and on and on it goes!
The gyrations these morons undergo to maintain the “fat is evil” mantra are nothing short of amazing.
@Brent – Randy Roach is an interesting character. An intelligent, free-thinking Canuk, and – imagine this – a full-on Paleo advocate.
Good stuff as always, Richard. Give ‘em hell -
Randy Roach references my ancestor, Francis Pottenger, throughout Muscle, Smoke, & Mirrors with high regard and respect. I am developing into a big Randy Roach fan.
Richard, what happened to yesterday’s new year’s resolution of civility?
I never said anything about civility. I said I’d tone it down and in particular cull the foul language.
It’s for me to decide what that means. In particular, probably no f-bombs or other near expletives.
Didn’t have the patience to put up with all the inanity in the comments. “Where will they get their B vitamins? Oh, My!”
Thanks for your thoughtful contributions- maybe you got through to a few folks.
And Happy New Year!
I think the lean meat mantra must come from the minimal marbling found in natural, grass-fed animals. Thing is, there are thick layers of fat under the hide, and I think people are projecting on to paleo man the modern practice of trimming off the fat. I’ve seen it claimed that some primitive peoples actually tossed the leanest meat and ate only the organs and fatty parts.
dumbasses ?? Resolution? To those of us who are happy about this change Richard, it would be nice to see consistency. A curse word is a curse word is a curse word. C’mon man. Make a decision.
“…it would be nice to see consistency.”
Good. That’s what I’m doing.
It is funny and ironic that the authors of the abstract are totally effin’ missing the effin’ point. Namely, the Paleo Diet is an attempt to “duplicate the evolutionary metabolic milieu” as Kurt Harris MD puts it so succinctly.
From http://www.paleonu.com/what-is-panu (emphasis mine)
“PāNu is an approach to living centered on the thesis that the diseases of civilization are largely related to abandonment of the metabolic conditions we evolved under – what I have termed the “evolutionary metabolic milieu” – EM2.
Returning to EM2 is not based on paleolithic food re-enactment. You don’t have to eat bugs or wooly mammoths. Unlike many popular “diets”, it doesn’t require a calculator, or even a recipe book once you learn some basic science about food.
We can make sense of many of the diseases that are prevalent now and relate them to some simple but profound changes that have occurred with the introduction of agriculture. These changes are related to how the food environment, including it’s cultural and biological availability, interacts with the metabolic environment in our bodies.”
Actually, strike that. The situation might not just be funny or ironic, it might be a disaster. The authors might not only be totally missing the effin’ point, but might be tragically blind to the obvious as well as — I just noticed that grains were not mentioned in the abstract.
To be fair, I don’t have access to the article itself and they might have addressed grains appropriately within the article.
Panning the Paleo diet for being low in Vit D is ridiculous. Is the conventional western diet loaded with IU’s upon IU’s of Vitamin D3 from those healthy whole grains? To me there is nothing wrong with lean meats so long as they are served with a generous portion of avocado or have a nice sauté in coconut oil. Also “Lean Meat” is not always pointing towards low in fat, I would take some “low fat” ground Omega 3 beef and to me that would be a healthy lean meat yet packed with CLA, Omega 3’s and other healthy nourishing fats as well as a dose of protein….
All the best in 2010! Regards
Chris – Zen to Fitness
The Washington Post article was a step in the right direction but I had to roll my eyes at who was chosen to represent the Paleo lifestyle–a typical DC yuptroid with the requisite subtle-but-edgy face tattoo who shops at Whole Foods and plops down $250/month for Crossfit classes and makes sure to fill said Whole Foods cart with imported organic veggies before she goes for the (gasp!) fish. There are a couple of really good farmer’s markets in the DC/Northern Virginia area that offer locally raised meat and produce; I wish the writer of the WaPo article had gone to one of them to find her subject.
And let’s not forget that vitamin D is fat soluble, thus it needs fat to be properly absorbed.
Vilhjalmur Stefannson’s case is very interesting, and illustrates a number of issues that you blog about on a regular basis.
Havind said that, one paradoxical factoid. Vilhjalmur Stefannson died at 83 from stroke. Ancel Keys lived until he was almost 101 years of age.
I guess you have to take the bad with the good. The vitamin D thing is hilarious. I don’t think primal man was slathering SPF 50 on everytime he was exposed to 2 minutes of sunshine, either. Maybe their diet wasn’t rich in vitamin D, but I doubt they were suffering from any deficiencies!